Ufuk Serin is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara. After graduating from METU’s Department of Architecture, she obtained her MSc in Cultural Heritage Conservation from the same university. She received her doctoral degree in Early Christian Art and Archaeology from the Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana (PIAC), Vatican City. She has received doctoral and post-doctoral research grants and fellowships from prestigious institutions, including the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz/Max-Planck-Institut, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA in association with the School for Advanced Research (SAR), and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. She coordinated the Turkish component of the partnership in the Byzantium-Early Islam Project (BYZeIS) of the Euromed Heritage III Program. Her research interests include Late Antique and Byzantine architecture and urbanism, architectural history, contested heritage, and the interpretation and presentation of heritage sites. Her current research investigates the role of spolia in constructing memory in Byzantine architecture and how such memories affected the interpretation of architecture by the Byzantine beholder. Using literary and archaeological evidence, it identifies how the perception of architecture of memory and transcendence acquired new meanings and qualities, how architecture constructed of spolia created or reinforced collective memory, and how this was exploited by patrons and builders in Late Antiquity and Byzantium to evoke or manipulate specific memories.